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The Project Facilitator was interviewed in April 2005 and the Director in the following
August. The Director had been involved with the organisation since it was established in the
mid-1970s and the Project Facilitator had been in role since 1997.
The researcher had known both interviewees for a number of years and had been involved in
two projects related to an Irish dimension at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. The
Director provided the following rationale to explain how they worked with teachers:
I think an operational principle [in our work] is that our objective has been to engage
teachers in the process of curriculum change, not to be on the outside.
This partly reflected the small size of the organisation as well as the nature of its work with
local teachers. The implication of this was that the teachers were fully involved in the
planning and the production of resources related to Ireland. The Project Facilitator said that
the objectives of their work were encapsulated in a pamphlet written in 1999 called Essential
Learning for Everyone: Civil Society, World Citizenship and the Role of Education. The
Director was involved in editing and writing this pamphlet which set out to explore
development education issues within partners in Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland (North
and Republic) within the Development Education Commission. The Project Facilitator said
that the booklet summarised the key areas of their work. This was presented as a spider
diagram with the title ‘The adjectival educations’ above it. In the middle of the page was the
caption ‘A core essential for everyone’. This caption was linked to other captions showing the
scope of their work which included Development Education, Environmental Education, Peace
Education, Gender Education, Multicultural Education, Anti-Racist Education and Human
Rights Education. These cross-curricular ‘adjectival educations’ overlaid the subjects in the
National Curriculum.